During the course of the unmoderated conversation, the authors touched on a variety of dynamic topics including friendship, education and masculinity, opening the festival.
Authors Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal were welcomed as keynote speakers for the 2023 Unbound Book Festival on Friday, April 21 at the Missouri Theatre.
Gay has released four poetry books and two essay collections, including “Be Holding,” “Bringing the Shovel Down” and his 2022 book of essays, “Inciting Joy.” The author also works as an English professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
Meanwhile, Rosal has written five total poetry books, including his 2021 collection “The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems,” which won the William Carlos Williams Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Rosal currently teaches in the English and Communication department at Rutgers University Camden.
Before the authors sat down for their conversation, Alex George, the executive director of the festival, gave a short speech. George discussed the recent vote by the Republican-led Missouri House to cut all funding for libraries from the state’s annual budget. These cuts are in response to lawsuits launched by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association against a recent Missouri law banning sexually explicit material from schools.
The budget cuts are currently awaiting approval by the Senate. During his speech, George urged the audience to call their state representatives in protest.
Following this speech, Sheri-Marie Harrison, the associate dean of graduate studies and faculty success for the English department at MU, gave her own speech before the authors took the stage, emphasizing the importance of bringing people together in spaces like the festival to share ideas.
Before the conversation, Gay read his essay “Scarecrow the World.” The essay is going to be released in “The Book of More Delights,” a sequel of sorts to Gay’s 2019 “The Book of Delights.” Rosal read his poem “A Town Called Sadness,” which was released in “The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems.”
Rosal and Gay have known each other for roughly 30 years; the authors first met while studying at Sarah Lawrence College. As a result of their friendship, the conversation itself was very casual — full of cursing and jokes.
“On his f phone, as usual,” Gay said as Rosal videotaped the crowd. Both men stopped to point and laugh at the curse word transcribed in the speech-to-text display on the screen above them. This comical tone was imbued in the event as there were numerous instances where the audience roared with laughter.
Their discussion began in contemplation of childhood as much of the authors’ work revolves around youth and the observation of youth. The two spoke about the camaraderie they feel with the other boys they grew up with and the societal complications of such relationships as people of color.
“There’s a danger in that,” Rosal said. “That somehow intimacy between young brown and black men poses a kind of a threat to the world.”
In their discussion of youth, the two discussed the intersection of curiosity and masculinity. Gay explained how the two factors can sometimes come into conflict with each other.
“One of the things [limiting curiosity] is a certain kind of being a dude … The ambition was to be a master,” Gay said. “One of the practices of ‘thinking you’re the man’ is to deny your own need and the fantasy of needlessness.”
The authors later discussed how, in their view, the educational environment is centered on individual achievement rather than collaborative learning.
“The model of the workshop — which is the model of other things — is to be exceptional,” Gay said. “Distinguish one’s self from the others. It’s the school model. It has nothing to do with care, nothing to do with collaboration, nothing to do with community. It has to do with isolating yourself.”
During the speech, Gay and Rosal reflected on several teachers who impacted their writing careers, particularly the late Thomas Lux. The pair actually met in one of Lux’s writing classes at Sarah Lawrence.
“I could never write so many of the poems I write without his ear, his syntax,” Gay said of his former professor Lux.
Rosal attributed the phrase, “You have to risk sentimentality in order to get at true sentiment,” to Lux. This phrase came up again and again during the conversation.
In reflection of their friendship, Rosal explained how early in their careers they jokingly plotted to write poems and put them in each other’s books without telling anyone. Gay explained that he’ll sometimes forget whether he or Rosal wrote a specific line.
The authors pointed out that being friends is not someone fulfilling a role in someone else’s life. As they put it, being friends is bearing witness to another person’s growth.
“The blessing is not that [they] will fulfill something in your life that you think intimacy is supposed to fulfill,” Rosal said. “The thing is [they] will turn into something that you would never expect [them] to turn into.”
Edited by Savvy Sleevar | [email protected]
Copy edited by Sam Barrett and Lauren Courtney